The Phantom Dust re-release recently hit Xbox One and Windows 10. Phantom Dust originally released in 2004 in Japan on the original Xbox and then in 2005 in the west. Originally geared towards winning over Japanese market, the game found enough demand to make a western release viable. The game itself is a unique mix … Continue reading Mage Wars Design Pitch – Phantom Dust Inspired

Been playing around in the DOOM SnapMap editor lately. You can check out my first map in an older blog post here. Moving forward on a future map though, I wanted to create something that would match the quality of levels from DOOM’s campaign. As if I was on the team at Id Software and … Continue reading DOOM Game/Level Flow Analysis

I have this horrible habit of doing research or making pitch/design docs and then just... never putting them in a place for people to see. So I am going to go through my hard drive for the next couple weeks and start posting some of the gems from the past couple years. Today I have … Continue reading Darkest Dungeon, Banner Saga, XCOM Game Flow Analysis

So I recently created a level for DOOM's SnapMap editor. Was a pretty nifty little tool and I wanted to share the level I made here. Below is a trailer and full walkthrough of the level. If you own a copy of DOOM for any system, feel free to check the level out. Just search … Continue reading Last Step – DOOM SnapMap Level

Let's talk melee combat here for a second. There is little in this blue world of ours as visceral and entertaining as that of physically overpowering an enemy in close quarters combat. It’s a human instinct as primal as they come and one of the most common forms of conflict in video games. As conventional … Continue reading DMC Melee Breakdown

A lot of diehard fans will argue how Gears 3 is drastically different from Gears 1. How is it different though? I spent some time recording the actions performed by a player in a 20 minute segment of each game and put them side by side. Although the following statistics are not completely representative of … Continue reading Gears of War – Campaign Level Progression

It’s important to know your source material when designing - to do your research. When creating a level for an already established game, it would be wasteful to not study the original game(s). So before I got too far into designing my Gears of War level, I wanted to study several aspects of the series, … Continue reading Gears of War 1 & 3 Campaign Level Comparison